Friederike Bubenzer

Whitney M. Young Fellow

Friederike Bubenzer is Senior Project Leader in the Justice and Peacebuilding Programme at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town, South Africa. In this capacity she contributes to the building of peacebuilding, social cohesion and reconciliation processes with policy makers and civil society leaders in South Sudan, Uganda, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Kenya. She also coordinates IJR’s Transitional Justice in Africa Fellowship and Alumni Programme. She is the co-editor of ‘Hope, Pain and Patience: The Lives of Women in South Sudan’ (Jacana, 2011) and is passionate about furthering inclusive dialogue and action around social justice issues across Africa.

She is currently working on a research project on the interconnectedness between mental health and peace building. This is a collaboration between IJR and the War Trauma Foundation and feeds on from an international conference and its outcome report. The hypothesis underlying this study is that communities are likely to continue to be caught in cycles of pain and conflict if historical and intergenerational trauma is not acknowledged and integrated into long-term post-conflict reconstruction and social transformation efforts (including historical dialogue). Ms Bubenzer is also the IJR coordinator of a collaborative project between IJR and Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela at the University of Stellenbosch titled ‘Trauma, Memory and Representations of the Past’ which seeks to understand manifestations of intergenerational trauma in South Africa.

Ms. Bubenzer holds an MPhil in Development Studies and Social Transformation from the University of Cape Town and undergraduate degrees in International Relations from the University of Stellenbosch.